Google has a new product coming out this year called “Google Wave.” The Google Wave team demonstrated it recently at a developer’s conference.

Part of the demo. was the brilliant “Rosy” robot. Rosy provides “real-time automatic translation of written text” (Joshua J. Estelle, via YouTube description of video below).

The Google engineers have created a real written equivalent of Douglas Adams’ Babel fish. And it’s amazing – check out the video below.

The Babel fish appeared in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the hit science-fiction comedy series originally produced as a radio show on BBC’s Radio 4 – a small, yellow fish which, when inserted in the ear(!) provided simultaneous translation from one spoken language to another, anywhere in space.

That was an invention – Rosy is real and does that for the digital word and written text. Like I said, amazing.

There are just 6.7 billion of us now living in the Real World and one thing that separates us are the many languages we speak. That separateness has been carried over to the digital world.

But now Rosy comes along to take that away in the digital world for written, real-time communication. The implications are stunning.

Here’s the video:

I was going to include a little ditty singing the praises of Rosy to the tune of Daisy, Daisy, but here’s a much better idea – if you’d like to to hear an extract about the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy click here and enjoy!